Deeplinks Blog posts about No Downtime for Free Speech

We’ve seen some absurd trademark threats in recent years, but this one sets the bar at a new low: The Village Voice is suing Yelp for trademark infringement based on Yelp’s creation of various “Best of” lists. Yes, that's correct, the publisher behind the paper (as well as several other weeklies around the U.S.) has managed to register trademarks in the term “Best of ” in connection with several cities, including San Francisco, Miami, St. Louis and Phoenix. And it now claims that Yelp’s use of those terms infringes those trademarks and deceives consumers.

We are living in an era where transparency — be it from government, corporations, or individuals — has come to be expected. As such, social media platforms have come under scrutiny in recent years for their policies around content moderation, but perhaps none have received as much criticism as Facebook.

After a year-long seizure and six more months of secrecy, the court records were finally released concerning the mysterious government takedown of Dajaz1.com – a popular blog dedicated to hip hop music and culture.The records confirm that one of the key reasons the blog remained censored for so long is that the government obtained three secret extensions of time by claiming that it was waiting for “rights holders” and later, the Recording Industry Association of America, to evaluate a "sampling of allegedly infringing content" obtained from the website and respond to other “outstanding questions.”

The Internet can breathe a sigh of relief today. In the latest twist in the long-running Viacom v. YouTubelitigation, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals revived the entertainment giant’s suit against Google – but simultaneously eviscerated most of the legal theories on which the lawsuit was based.

Here’s the quick and dirty: Back in 2010, a district court threw out Viacom’s suit against YouTube, finding that the safe harbors outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protected YouTube from all copyright liability. Viacom appealed, based on unprecedented legal theories that, if adopted, would have rendered the DMCA safe harbors a dead letter.